It's Been Three Years Since the Madoff Bust

The New York Times' Diana B. Henriques reports on the lingering hard feelings, three years after Bernie Madoff's arrest. She also dishes on his emails from prison.

Madoff has been emailing the reporter (also his biographer) all year with his musings and reflections from behind bars.

“One of the many problems of my life here is the amount of time to think,” Madoff writes.

In dozens of e-mails this year, Mr. Madoff has fiercely disputed Mr. Picard’s assertions that he was a fraud from the start. He calls that allegation “an absurd theory.”

His message to Mr. Picard and prosecutors: “Stop beating a dead horse,” he wrote, in capital letters, in an e-mail dated Nov. 24.

“It drives me crazy,” Mr. Madoff wrote in mid-October, that the trustee and the government “developed their theory that no trading took place ever.”

He continued: “I wish I never agreed not to go to trial, when all this could have been aired.” And then: “I feel sad that it is not really in anyone’s interest to try and uncover the facts at this point. Not that I would ever be exonerated for the fraud I did commit.”

Meanwhile, the aforementioned Picard, the trustee trying disentangle what remains of Madoff's scheme, has deeply angered some victims by insisting that they cannot keep funds they withdrew from their Madoff accounts over the years. What looked like real returns were fake; they should go, Picard believes, to those whose initial investments were squandered in the pyramid scheme.

News reports are focusing on the Germanwings pilot's possible depression, following a familiar script in the wake of mass killings. But the evidence shows violence is extremely rare among the mentally ill.